Three Stones

Driving into work one evening, I noticed a column of rocks stacked neatly by the edge of the woods along the roadside. “I wonder who put those there,” I thought to myself as I continued on.

The simple fact that I had asked myself that question prompted even more reflection. Not so much on the existence of the stack of rocks, but why was that the particular question that popped into my head? After all, three rocks stacked one on top of the other is an extremely simple construct. It’s not like those rocks were built into a bridge, or a house, or some other structure. Just three rocks, stacked.

Yet I immediately defaulted to the assumption that someone had put them there. Some intelligent being had picked up those three rocks, and stacked them just so. It never once occurred to me that natural forces might have acted upon those rocks and caused them to end up that way. Of course it is possible that forces such as erosion, gravity, wind, or water could have come together in such a way as to place those three rocks in that column; those sorts of formations do appear naturally in places like Monument Valley. It becomes a little harder to explain next to a wooded road in Kentucky.

What would you think, if you saw a similar stack of rocks in an otherwise improbable place? I imagine that most people would immediately ask a similar question…immediately, reflexively. “Who put those there?” Despite the extremely simple nature of the structure, we innately understand that it was built with an intelligent hand. At the same time, there are those who would insist that other vastly more complex systems occurred by accident. Human beings, planets, the universe, and all the forces which make them all function…just happened?

 I don’t know how you reconcile the two positions. Three rocks stacked we readily accept as a result of intelligent design, but the complexities of life and the universe are a random occurrence? Unless you can look at those three rocks and honestly believe that their arrangement could truly be just a roll of the cosmic dice; that nothing more than the laws of physical science just happened to put them there…I don’t see how you can logically look at the universe that way, either.

Me? I don’t believe for a second that those three rocks ended up that way by accident. And as such, I can’t believe that life, the universe, and everything in it is an accident, either.